Untitled

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 6176, 6 April 1907, Page 5

The United States has a greater proportion of schoolchildren fo population of any country in the world. About 190 per IUOO of her population are children at school, while in Russia the proportion is only 20 per 1000. The value of passengers' evidence in cases of marine casualty has perhaps never been more correctly gauged than in the recently-held nautical inquiry on a collision between the S.S. John Anderson and the steam launch Purau, in Lyttelton Harbour. The statements of a large number of highly respectable people, whose disinterestedness and characters placed them quite above any suspicion of not telling what they actually believed to bo true, were so equally divided and so distinctly opposite that Mr H. W. Bishop and his colleagues were constrained to lot one side cancel the other, and decline to give a decision on the point as to which vessel had infringed the rule of the road. It is notorious that in cases of collision the passengers on - either vessel aro always ready to swear that the other vessel ran into them. The case under inquiry was complicated by the fact that both vessels wore proceeding in the same direction, and as the collision occurred through one or both vessels sheering into close proximity, the passengers on both faithfully adhered to the established rule. As, however, the main cause was a race for the wharf at Purau, the ends of justice were served by both masters having to pay between them the costs of tho inquiry.